He's talking about during war games, that is, during exercises with those nations.
Effectively during said exercises these nations have been able to get their submarines close enough to, if it were a real war, have been in a position where they could have trivially launched a torpedo attack and where no other ship in the fleet would've been able to do jack shit about it by that point.
It's also worth bearing in mind that a Chinese sub did exactly this and "jumped" a US carried a few years back too and it wasn't a war game, but fortunately the Chinese were also not looking to start a war, just make a point.
Getting to a point where you could launch a succesful torpedo strike on exercise and it happening in a real war are no different in practice for the most part, so if these nations could do it on exercise, they could do it in a real war too. The only things that could possibly change are strokes of luck - i.e. the submarine's torpedo tubes failing to fire or some random event like that, but that's a lot to hinge your carrier's safety on.
The upside of it though is that although this sort of fact might dent the average American's ultra-patriotic national pride, it does mean that it gives your fleet the opportunity to learn from this sort of incident and exercise, so that if it ever reaches this point for real, your fleet may know how to avoid such a threat - that's the whole point in exercises, they're like penetration tests and if the US Navy has any sense, it'll use them as an opportunity to learn and plug those holes that it's ally's fleets discovered and exploited.
Yeah, except assassination of political leaders is a big no-no for good reason - because it works both ways.
Sure Obama could order the funding of an assassin to eliminate Ahmadinejad, but do you then think his replacement, or his superiors such as the Ayatollah wouldn't also fund the same kind of op on US soil? The West is no more immune to infiltration/people being turned in this sort of way, as the number of cold war spies managed to show.
Of course, the response may not just even be like for like, a dirty bomb on US soil, or more 9/11 terrorist attacks - if a rag-tag bunch of terrorists working from Afghanistan can pull that sort of thing off, a state certainly isn't going to struggle.
Assassinations of leaders are never a good idea because the repercussions are so unpredictable, and widespread counter-assassinations are only going to cause massive global instability. Even change of leadership through legitimate democratic process can send ripples through international relations, through assassination you'll merely get chaos.
"Good examples in that the value of the english pound is now half of what it used to be"
Great, so what? it just means it's more competitive in the export market. I don't really understand what your point is here, a healthy currency should be able to fluctuate relative to global financial changes. It doesn't change the fact that the UK is doing fine.
If you think Germany isn't socialist, then you're simply picking and choosing what socialism is to suit your argument. You also conveniently ignore my other examples - Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland? Why did you ignore them? Simply because it was convenient to your false assertion?
"If you want to see how quickly a country can get ruined by socialism, look at Greece (6 years), Spain (3 years), Cuba (2 years), Argentina (4 years)"
These figures make absolutely no sense, because they're nowhere near a realistic reflection of how long these nations have been socialist, they're not even close, they seem to just be arbitrary single digit numbers you've plucked out your arse.
"Socialism has a long history of quickly ruining countries, and the correlation is so strong"
Given the fact that the biggest victims to the global financial crisis have all been much more slanted towards capitalism, whilst those who have continued to thrive have been slanted more towards socialism, one might also argue that there is much more evidence that capitalism does exactly that with a much stronger correlation. Of course, correlation is not causation as the oft repeated mantra here goes, in this case, the same applies. Countries like the UK and US definitely suffered heavily though precisely due to a weakly regulated free market capitalist approach to banking though, there's really no question about that.
"I can predict with 99% certainty that France is going to go broke in 5 years thanks to Hollande."
Cool, I predict with 100% certainty that you're wrong, what a fun game predict the unpredictable to an arbitrarily decided certainty is!
Meh, apologies, I meant to say Russia, not USSR - i.e. population of Russia is 141million vs. 196million for Brazil. I typed USSR because I was referring to it as a superpower, rather than what is now simply just Russia - a mistake I suspect you made yourself in your last sentence.
"It's the government of Argentina that is "gaming the system" by artificially increasing the price of dollars. Smart people are realizing that socialist policies are going to bring high inflation as they always do and wipe away people's life savings in the name of social justice."
Like all systems, just as over the top free market capitalism led to the banking collapse, over the top socialism can indebt a country beyond it's means too (Greece).
But what isn't true is that socialist policies in general always inherently bring high inflation. Countries like Canada, Germany, the UK, most the Scandinavian nations and so forth are good examples.
Using one failing country to push your own political ideology is stupid, especially so when there are many other countries succesfully using elements of that ideology you so sternly oppose and claim is doomed to failure.
I don't even recall any of the bankers themselves losing their jobs really. It was all the support staff that suffered like IT, admin, and customer facing branch staff. In this respect, and as the investment banks and customer facing banks are often different sub-companies, I'm not even sure people from investment arms of banks really paid a price at all for the most part.
Also, a year later, they were all getting hefty bonuses again to boot.
"Ja. "Phones shipped" is a crap metric because a lot of those phones sold just sit on store shelves and don't get sold. "Phones sold" tell you how many are actually being bought an used by consumers."
This is such a stupid argument, yet it gets brought up time and time again. Companies rarely ever so grossly over-manufacture expensive products like phones that they end up on store shelves not getting sold, in part because retailers wouldn't put up with this. Why would they give up retail real estate for something that doesn't even sell? There has been the odd notable flop, but by and large it's rarely true for the most part. Further, when this argmuent is brought up, those bringing up said argument NEVER provide any evidence to prove that their favourite supplier is giving any different a statistic to their fanboy nemesis supplier's product. We saw it with the PS3/XBox 360 too, where Sony fans were certain Microsoft only talked shipped units and Sony always talked sold units, yet no evidence was ever provided to show that either company was talking about a different product (or even Nintendo for that matter when the Wii fanboys/haters got involved).
"Then the court forced them to report actual sales and it turned out that Samsung had only sold 1.4 million tablets total over 18 months. Apple sold ~30 million iPads over the same period."
This was another misleading argument. The tablets Samsung reported in it's case were merely those that were argued to be infringing on Apple's patents. Samsung released alternative versions of it's tablets quite quickly and so the figures it quoted were only for those that would could or could not have been determined to be infringing in the case. The later editions of it's tablets that had some minor changes to avoid being relevant to the case were not involved in those numbers because they simply weren't relevant to the case - the case wasn't about them and so any compensation it was deemed Samsung should pay Apple could've been skewed if the jury intentionally or mistakenly took non-infringing devices into account.
"If a company says, "we shipped X" but won't report "we sold X," it's probably because most of their gear is gathering dust down at the Best Buy."
If a company says "we shipped X" they pretty much always mean exactly the same thing as companies that pretend otherwise. Companies like Apple have no more or no less of a clue how well 3rd party retailers are doing at selling their product than Samsung does. Apple has the advantage of knowing 1st party sales, but that still only tells part the picture.
Honestly, the only thing the shipped vs. sold argument does is provide fanboys with an arbitrary unproven reason to claim their device is doing better than whatever device they currently choose to hate. It's a get out clause, it's the god argument, it's for people who can't provide anything worthwhile to backup their chosen preference.
I think Brazil is bigger, and much of it's population living with much more modern internet connections than you think is the case.
Keep in mind Brazil is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. That's not something some small "3rd World" nation can trivially afford to do.
No, Brazil is the 7th biggest economy in the world putting it right behind the UK, some estimates nowadays even putting it as larger than the UK, but certainly making it bigger than Italy, Canada, India, Russia.
Yes, that's right. Brazil has a bigger population and more wealth than even old super powers like the USSR and even the supposed up and coming nations like India. Whilst like the US, Brazil has areas that can be called 3rd world, it seems a bit wrong to call Brazil as a whole either small, or 3rd world, unless you also think countries like Russia are 3rd world too.
I don't think it's suprising to see Brazil there at all, it's a large top 10 major world economy.
Seriously though, I was under the impression the term piracy stems from pirate radio, which was historically about radio stations that would broadcast from international waters such as in the North Sea next to the UK back to land because the state limited who could broadcast at the time to only a handful (one? the BBC?) of broadcasters which pissed people off and wasn't in fact anything to do with making copies but was arguably more similar to current music piracy - broadcast of content illegaly.
"About 25% of the British workforce is a member of a union. Not many people today spend their whole lives only in organised workplaces. Believing you have special knowledge means, in fact, that you have very little knowledge.
And you can certainly be called subjective while you're talking about your personal experience. Indeed, Unison is probably the best example of an overly politicised union, as well as being completely public sector, so unrepresentative of a mostly private sector workforce."
So let me get this straight, on one hand you're saying that because so many people are in unions in the UK I don't have a point, yet I do have a point regarding Unison but it's a special case and doesn't count?
The problem with that argument is that Unison is one of the biggest in the UK and further, unions like Unite, and pretty much all the other TUC members are just like Unison, meaning that large percentage of the working population in unions is represented by precisely the type of politicised union you're saying I do have a point about but for some arbitrary reason you indirectly imply "doesn't count".
Of course, your implication that because 25% of the UK's work force is unionised, that I'm not special in my experience. That of course ignores the fact that as I pointed out, I was not simply a member as the vast majority of the work force are, but a volunteer and organiser also.
"Compared to much of Europe, no it doesn't - and they're being thoroughly diluted."
They are? I've seen proposals to dilute them but nothing concrete yet. I think you're confusing proposals with something that's actually happened. "Much of Europe" is also current reeling from over the top social benefits that were simply unaffordable, Greece being the obvious example. I'm all for a strong social security blanket and good employee protections, but it has to be affordable too.
"The main purpose of a union is to facilitate a dialogue between the two sides of industry, primarily providing the voice of the workers. Workers present the grievances which cause higher staff turnover, lower productivity and (in the worst cases) desperate dishonesty, and management provide solutions which fit in with the organisation's constraints (profit or budgetary)."
Right, this is probably why we disagree so greatly then. For me, if I feel mistreated in a workplace, I leave and go elsewhere. It's no big deal because I'm hard working and make sure my skills are always kept uptodate. If you're one of those people who think the world owes you a job and that it's upto your employer to ensure you're always satisfied in that job rather than it being upto you to find a job that satisfies you then yes, this is where our opinions will diverge. In my opinion it's absolutely meaningless fighting an employer to consistently please you in your job, because if you've reached the point where you're displeased then it's near impossible to change that with union support or not.
"In order to do this, unions keep their members informed about the law and company practices. They monitor for both statutory and non-statutory abuses. If negotiation should fail, they provide legally trained staff to represent their members."
Why do we need unions to do this? are employees all completely unable to do anything for themselves where you work?
"and the vague comment about pension provision (we've always had pension provision!)"
What's vague about it? It's a solid statutory requirement that has already been enforced for large firms, and will be enforced for smaller firms shortly (I can't remember the exact date, but it is set in stone already).
"You're just listing random protections you can remember vaguely that UK workers have, and adding words like "excellent", "incredibly strong" and "effective"."
Well no, I'm listing the quality of them, because that IS the quality of them. As a union volunteer I saw them in action plenty enough and they were of the quality I suggest, but keep making assumptions if it makes you fe
The problem is that in John Young's article he's trying to setup a hosting solution etc. himself.
What this doesn't imply is what you have suggested - that anonymity in general is dead.
Tell me, if I were to use an open wireless access point, or hack an insecure wireless access point at some random joe's house, or a public access point or similar from a nearby car park, for example, at a busy supermarket, at a service station or so on or even down a quiet side street in a rural area - effectively somewhere where I am either masked by numbers, or masked merely by virtue of being in the arse end of nowhere - and I created a random hotmail account or similar and e-mailed a bunch of leaked documents to somewhere like Wikileaks who would then publish them, how on earth do you think my identity would be discovered? who on earth do you think would track me down and how?
There's so may ways you could do this, even walking through somewhere like Heathrow or a busy train station like London Kings Cross looking like any other business commuter if I accessed wifi from within the gents toilets then again, how would they find out who did it?
There are Wifi cards out there that let you specify a custom MAC address so that isn't going to act as a clue for them, the time for Wikileaks to publish/analyse would likely be so long that it'd grossly mask the time frame the authorities would have to look through CCTV, and when they do what are they looking for? a person with a laptop bag in one of the busiest business commuter stations in the world?
It's still easy as it's ever been to leak and never get caught. You just have to be smart about how you're going to do it. This isn't the same thing as the article you posted discusses though.
"Domscheit-Berg shocked WikiLeaks supporters this week when he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that heâ(TM)d deleted more than 3,500 unpublished documents that he and an associate took with them when they left the organization last year. He said he destroyed the documents because Julian Assange could not guarantee safe handling of the files or their sources."
Which simply further demonstrates your lack of clue about iOS development more so than it says anything about the validity of your argument.
We support the iPhone and iPad in our iOS products, even if we only support one version of each, the fact we have to make interface changes between the two means we're dealing with fragmentation.
You can pretend it doesn't exist all you want, but that doesn't make it true. It absolutely does exist.
If you simply said "Android still has a bigger fragmentation problem than iOS" then you'd be absolutely correct, but to say it doesn't exist on iOS products at all? That simply shows that you've no idea what the hell you are on about.
No, that's a completely nonsensical definition. If it merely describes devices on sale then it's a pointless term.
Fragmentation is the issue of having different devices with different configurations that may have to be supported in a product. It is simply nothing more than that. The level of fragmentation depends on the number of different combinations you will have to deal with - this can in fact be different from developer to developer depending on how far back or how widely the developer chooses to support a platform.
I don't know why people are bringing what products are on sale into it, it's completely irrelevant that the iPad 1 is no longer on sale - if a developer still feels a need to support it to make developer of their product viable then they still have to deal with that product's differences whether it's on sale or not anymore. Redefining the term to simply refer to products on sale makes the term meaningless, because at that point it bears no resemblance to how developers see the problem, because developers need a term that includes all products they may have to support, not just those on sale. If you're going to redefine the term then fine, but it's then not a stick to beat Android with because it's arbitrary and has no value as a term other than for penis waving.
It was always obvious Apple's products were going to become more fragmented with time, because fragmentation is an inevitable consequence of advancement. Android suffered higher levels of fragmentation quicker simply because it had more different devices on the market, but Apple was never ever going to become immune to it. If Apple fanboys are now trying to redefine what fragmentation is because it's becoming an ever more prominent problem on iOS then I really feel for them, it's pretty sad. I guess said fanboys are just a bit upset they now have egg on their face when people defending their original trolling about Android fragmentation pointed out that this was a problem all advancing platforms have to deal with to advance anyway.
Fragmentation has always been about the number of combinations of features you may have to support, not simply the combinations amongst devices on sale, because people are still developing for iOS5 and earlier, people are still developing for the original iPad, and the iPhone 3GS and earlier, whether they're on sale or not. Increased fragmentation causes a real tangible issue for those developers, but it's one that any sane and competent developer should have expected all along, increased fragmentation is, quite simply, the cost of progress and the only reason to not plan for it in development is if you never plan to support any other devices than those you are developing for initially.
Just keep in mind it can be as high as 1200, it was only this low precisely because of the circumstances of the case (i.e. that he didn't actually do the downloading, nor did he know how, and he also paid for a 3rd party to document removal of the illegal downloads from his system).
The 120 euros in this case doesn't make it sane, the fact given the circumstances of the case, that this guy got any kind of punishment is insane.
"Isn't it interesting how desperate, fallen empires like the UK and the US are to demonstrate that unions don't work?"
Sorry, but in the UK, Unions absolutely do not work well.
I was a member of Unison (one of the UK's biggest unions, ~2million members) for about 6 years. Since then I've been working private sector (unionless) for about 5 years. I went on strike with them over public sector pay and conditions a number of times and even helped with some organising. As such, I know just a bit about unions in the UK and can hardly be called unobjective on the issue as I have a fairly even spread of experience both inside and outside of union circles.
It has nothing to do with empires (if you hadn't forgotten Germany attempted to build itself an empire last century too, and it too fell such that Germany is in itself a fallen empire) and the fact you bring that completely irrelevant and nonsensical point up demonstrates what an utterly stupid point you're starting from. It has to do with the fact that the UK has excellent employee protection laws such that unions are now entirely unnecessary for any reason other than to ensure those laws do not get weakened but as a result they have had to find themselves a new place in the world, sadly, that new place, is political interference and self-interest of the top tier.
What purpose exactly does a union serve in the UK now? we have strong health and safety laws, we have a very decent minimum wage, we have excellent redundancy terms and protection, we have excellent protection against unfair dismissal, we have incredibly strong equality laws, we have an effective industrial tribunal system, we're soon to have enforced pension provision, and so on.
Fundamentally the issues with Unison in the UK (and other unions) is that because the core principles they would originally exist to defend are now written in statute, they do a number of things:
1) Continue to push for wage inflation of their members as the primary method of keeping members on board. Note that a number of bipartisan, and independent studies have found that as of 2011 public sector workers were getting between 10% and 16% more pay for equivalent jobs relative to their private sector counterparts whilst receiving more leave, a better pension and more benefits. One could argue that this is precisely because the public sector doesn't have unions, but if the last few years have shown us anything it's actually because it's unaffordable. In fact, if you look at the rise in council tax in the UK it correlates strongly with the increase in public sector pay and benefits such that the net result is that private sector workers have become less well off because of union actions to over-inflate public sector benefits. It's been clear for some years now that the UK's public sector bill is unaffordable, and as such it is not sensible to argue that public sector wages being higher than private sector by such a degree are fair or sustainable. Unions like to deflect by pointing at the banks but this argument makes no sense - Gordon Brown built the public sector benefits off the back of the bank boom, the whole reason public sector workers were getting such a good deal in the first place was through turning a blind eye to, and milking their success.
2) Political interference, the union elite use their position to push their own political agendas. This is often counter to the interests of their workers, for example, helping Ed Milliband win the Labour leadership contest despite his brother, David, being a much more capable, much more competent, and much more viable counter to David Cameron. Effectively the unions ensured continuation of Brown era leadership putting people like Ed Balls (someone who I have met and spoken to personally a number of times) into key opposition positions despite him being a key architect of Brown's failed financial policies. It is a circle of vested self-interest that benefits no one other than themselves.
Honestly, unions in the UK do little more than pick fights
The obvious example is that if you take 10% more money and end up having to spend 20% more time at work then you've made a net loss. Similarly, if you take 10% more money for a job where you'll be working with technologies that are obsolete then you've stunted future career growth, if you take 10% when your employer 3 months down the line was going to promote you and increase wage by 20%, then you're going to be worse off overall. There are things like bonuses too, 10% and a 5% bonus is going to be worse than staying where you are if you get a 20% bonus each year for example.
But of course, some people value job satisfaction, some people prefer a bigger pension pot, some people prefer more leave, some people prefer shares and stock options, some people prefer potential future career growth, some people prefer learning potential. Honestly, 10% is peanuts, a company is wasting my time if they offer anything less than 20% to try and pull me over and thus far I've never moved for anything less than 30%.
If you think a mediocre increase in wage is worth jumping ship for no matter what you must either be used to working shit jobs, be really desperate for money, or have simply not worked much in your life.
Read my points again, the Inquisition is merely a combination of points 1, and 2, repeating them here:
1) It's really quite simple, religious extremists have killed people stating they did so because the people they killed refuse to have the same beliefs as them.
2) Dictatorships have killed people because those people wanted to live their lives differently to how the state determined they should live their lives and because they refused to devote their lives to the will of the state and it's leadership.
What the inquisition wasn't, is 3. What states based on Marxist ideals are, is 2, but not 3:
3) What hasn't happened is atheists killing people because those people they would've killed refused to not believe in god.
What implementers of Marxist/Leninist regimes were against was not a belief in god, but merely the idea that you not do as they wish because you'd been told to do/believe something else by your religious leader of choice. If you went up to Lenin and said "I believe in god, but I'll get on and do what you want" he likely wouldn't have cared. If you walked upto him and said "I believe in god, and my religious leader of choice said your idea is stupid" then he'd probably have shot you on the spot. It was about eliminating other sources of power and control from the equation because such sources of power inherently led to a hierarchy which went against their political ideology and which was hence a threat to their ideology. It was not the inherent belief/disbelief that was in question, but the fact that you would bend to the will of someone else.
The Inquisition was about the political elite using inquisitors as their security aparatus in the name of religion.
That's great, I too have seen many cracked screens on the train every day, a friend of mine has actually been through 4 screens on one phone.
But regardless, anecdotes are meaningless and we could go back and forth all day, so instead let's focus on the facts - the iPhone doesn't use gorilla glass or equivalent, it uses a much cheaper, weaker material than just about all flagship Android devices (the Galaxy Nexus is one exception I can think of). As such, the iPhone objectively has a weaker screen and is hence more likely and more prone to breaking whatever your anecdotes might say. As for the Blackberry I can't comment, but certainly there is objectively some truth in what the GP is saying - the iPhone has a much weaker screen than one would normally expect for the price, particularly when comparing to it's main competition, so it would make sense that on average it ends up with a broken screen more so than at least most equivalent Android (and for that matter, Windows Phone) handsets.
Slashdot Mirror
You should probably patent that now, before someone else does.
See here:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3126983&cid=41384989
He's likely talking about wargames - exercises with friendly nations where they simulate attacks against the US fleet.
He's talking about during war games, that is, during exercises with those nations.
Effectively during said exercises these nations have been able to get their submarines close enough to, if it were a real war, have been in a position where they could have trivially launched a torpedo attack and where no other ship in the fleet would've been able to do jack shit about it by that point.
It's also worth bearing in mind that a Chinese sub did exactly this and "jumped" a US carried a few years back too and it wasn't a war game, but fortunately the Chinese were also not looking to start a war, just make a point.
Getting to a point where you could launch a succesful torpedo strike on exercise and it happening in a real war are no different in practice for the most part, so if these nations could do it on exercise, they could do it in a real war too. The only things that could possibly change are strokes of luck - i.e. the submarine's torpedo tubes failing to fire or some random event like that, but that's a lot to hinge your carrier's safety on.
The upside of it though is that although this sort of fact might dent the average American's ultra-patriotic national pride, it does mean that it gives your fleet the opportunity to learn from this sort of incident and exercise, so that if it ever reaches this point for real, your fleet may know how to avoid such a threat - that's the whole point in exercises, they're like penetration tests and if the US Navy has any sense, it'll use them as an opportunity to learn and plug those holes that it's ally's fleets discovered and exploited.
Yeah, except assassination of political leaders is a big no-no for good reason - because it works both ways.
Sure Obama could order the funding of an assassin to eliminate Ahmadinejad, but do you then think his replacement, or his superiors such as the Ayatollah wouldn't also fund the same kind of op on US soil? The West is no more immune to infiltration/people being turned in this sort of way, as the number of cold war spies managed to show.
Of course, the response may not just even be like for like, a dirty bomb on US soil, or more 9/11 terrorist attacks - if a rag-tag bunch of terrorists working from Afghanistan can pull that sort of thing off, a state certainly isn't going to struggle.
Assassinations of leaders are never a good idea because the repercussions are so unpredictable, and widespread counter-assassinations are only going to cause massive global instability. Even change of leadership through legitimate democratic process can send ripples through international relations, through assassination you'll merely get chaos.
"Good examples in that the value of the english pound is now half of what it used to be"
Great, so what? it just means it's more competitive in the export market. I don't really understand what your point is here, a healthy currency should be able to fluctuate relative to global financial changes. It doesn't change the fact that the UK is doing fine.
If you think Germany isn't socialist, then you're simply picking and choosing what socialism is to suit your argument. You also conveniently ignore my other examples - Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland? Why did you ignore them? Simply because it was convenient to your false assertion?
"If you want to see how quickly a country can get ruined by socialism, look at Greece (6 years), Spain (3 years), Cuba (2 years), Argentina (4 years)"
These figures make absolutely no sense, because they're nowhere near a realistic reflection of how long these nations have been socialist, they're not even close, they seem to just be arbitrary single digit numbers you've plucked out your arse.
"Socialism has a long history of quickly ruining countries, and the correlation is so strong"
Given the fact that the biggest victims to the global financial crisis have all been much more slanted towards capitalism, whilst those who have continued to thrive have been slanted more towards socialism, one might also argue that there is much more evidence that capitalism does exactly that with a much stronger correlation. Of course, correlation is not causation as the oft repeated mantra here goes, in this case, the same applies. Countries like the UK and US definitely suffered heavily though precisely due to a weakly regulated free market capitalist approach to banking though, there's really no question about that.
"I can predict with 99% certainty that France is going to go broke in 5 years thanks to Hollande."
Cool, I predict with 100% certainty that you're wrong, what a fun game predict the unpredictable to an arbitrarily decided certainty is!
Meh, apologies, I meant to say Russia, not USSR - i.e. population of Russia is 141million vs. 196million for Brazil. I typed USSR because I was referring to it as a superpower, rather than what is now simply just Russia - a mistake I suspect you made yourself in your last sentence.
"It's the government of Argentina that is "gaming the system" by artificially increasing the price of dollars. Smart people are realizing that socialist policies are going to bring high inflation as they always do and wipe away people's life savings in the name of social justice ."
Like all systems, just as over the top free market capitalism led to the banking collapse, over the top socialism can indebt a country beyond it's means too (Greece).
But what isn't true is that socialist policies in general always inherently bring high inflation. Countries like Canada, Germany, the UK, most the Scandinavian nations and so forth are good examples.
Using one failing country to push your own political ideology is stupid, especially so when there are many other countries succesfully using elements of that ideology you so sternly oppose and claim is doomed to failure.
I don't even recall any of the bankers themselves losing their jobs really. It was all the support staff that suffered like IT, admin, and customer facing branch staff. In this respect, and as the investment banks and customer facing banks are often different sub-companies, I'm not even sure people from investment arms of banks really paid a price at all for the most part.
Also, a year later, they were all getting hefty bonuses again to boot.
How can I view this channel? It sounds as legendary as Russia Today, and Fox News.
"Ja. "Phones shipped" is a crap metric because a lot of those phones sold just sit on store shelves and don't get sold. "Phones sold" tell you how many are actually being bought an used by consumers."
This is such a stupid argument, yet it gets brought up time and time again. Companies rarely ever so grossly over-manufacture expensive products like phones that they end up on store shelves not getting sold, in part because retailers wouldn't put up with this. Why would they give up retail real estate for something that doesn't even sell? There has been the odd notable flop, but by and large it's rarely true for the most part. Further, when this argmuent is brought up, those bringing up said argument NEVER provide any evidence to prove that their favourite supplier is giving any different a statistic to their fanboy nemesis supplier's product. We saw it with the PS3/XBox 360 too, where Sony fans were certain Microsoft only talked shipped units and Sony always talked sold units, yet no evidence was ever provided to show that either company was talking about a different product (or even Nintendo for that matter when the Wii fanboys/haters got involved).
"Then the court forced them to report actual sales and it turned out that Samsung had only sold 1.4 million tablets total over 18 months. Apple sold ~30 million iPads over the same period."
This was another misleading argument. The tablets Samsung reported in it's case were merely those that were argued to be infringing on Apple's patents. Samsung released alternative versions of it's tablets quite quickly and so the figures it quoted were only for those that would could or could not have been determined to be infringing in the case. The later editions of it's tablets that had some minor changes to avoid being relevant to the case were not involved in those numbers because they simply weren't relevant to the case - the case wasn't about them and so any compensation it was deemed Samsung should pay Apple could've been skewed if the jury intentionally or mistakenly took non-infringing devices into account.
"If a company says, "we shipped X" but won't report "we sold X," it's probably because most of their gear is gathering dust down at the Best Buy."
If a company says "we shipped X" they pretty much always mean exactly the same thing as companies that pretend otherwise. Companies like Apple have no more or no less of a clue how well 3rd party retailers are doing at selling their product than Samsung does. Apple has the advantage of knowing 1st party sales, but that still only tells part the picture.
Honestly, the only thing the shipped vs. sold argument does is provide fanboys with an arbitrary unproven reason to claim their device is doing better than whatever device they currently choose to hate. It's a get out clause, it's the god argument, it's for people who can't provide anything worthwhile to backup their chosen preference.
I think Brazil is bigger, and much of it's population living with much more modern internet connections than you think is the case.
Keep in mind Brazil is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. That's not something some small "3rd World" nation can trivially afford to do.
No, Brazil is the 7th biggest economy in the world putting it right behind the UK, some estimates nowadays even putting it as larger than the UK, but certainly making it bigger than Italy, Canada, India, Russia.
Yes, that's right. Brazil has a bigger population and more wealth than even old super powers like the USSR and even the supposed up and coming nations like India. Whilst like the US, Brazil has areas that can be called 3rd world, it seems a bit wrong to call Brazil as a whole either small, or 3rd world, unless you also think countries like Russia are 3rd world too.
I don't think it's suprising to see Brazil there at all, it's a large top 10 major world economy.
But I like pirates :(
Seriously though, I was under the impression the term piracy stems from pirate radio, which was historically about radio stations that would broadcast from international waters such as in the North Sea next to the UK back to land because the state limited who could broadcast at the time to only a handful (one? the BBC?) of broadcasters which pissed people off and wasn't in fact anything to do with making copies but was arguably more similar to current music piracy - broadcast of content illegaly.
"About 25% of the British workforce is a member of a union. Not many people today spend their whole lives only in organised workplaces. Believing you have special knowledge means, in fact, that you have very little knowledge.
And you can certainly be called subjective while you're talking about your personal experience. Indeed, Unison is probably the best example of an overly politicised union, as well as being completely public sector, so unrepresentative of a mostly private sector workforce."
So let me get this straight, on one hand you're saying that because so many people are in unions in the UK I don't have a point, yet I do have a point regarding Unison but it's a special case and doesn't count?
The problem with that argument is that Unison is one of the biggest in the UK and further, unions like Unite, and pretty much all the other TUC members are just like Unison, meaning that large percentage of the working population in unions is represented by precisely the type of politicised union you're saying I do have a point about but for some arbitrary reason you indirectly imply "doesn't count".
Of course, your implication that because 25% of the UK's work force is unionised, that I'm not special in my experience. That of course ignores the fact that as I pointed out, I was not simply a member as the vast majority of the work force are, but a volunteer and organiser also.
"Compared to much of Europe, no it doesn't - and they're being thoroughly diluted."
They are? I've seen proposals to dilute them but nothing concrete yet. I think you're confusing proposals with something that's actually happened. "Much of Europe" is also current reeling from over the top social benefits that were simply unaffordable, Greece being the obvious example. I'm all for a strong social security blanket and good employee protections, but it has to be affordable too.
"The main purpose of a union is to facilitate a dialogue between the two sides of industry, primarily providing the voice of the workers. Workers present the grievances which cause higher staff turnover, lower productivity and (in the worst cases) desperate dishonesty, and management provide solutions which fit in with the organisation's constraints (profit or budgetary)."
Right, this is probably why we disagree so greatly then. For me, if I feel mistreated in a workplace, I leave and go elsewhere. It's no big deal because I'm hard working and make sure my skills are always kept uptodate. If you're one of those people who think the world owes you a job and that it's upto your employer to ensure you're always satisfied in that job rather than it being upto you to find a job that satisfies you then yes, this is where our opinions will diverge. In my opinion it's absolutely meaningless fighting an employer to consistently please you in your job, because if you've reached the point where you're displeased then it's near impossible to change that with union support or not.
"In order to do this, unions keep their members informed about the law and company practices. They monitor for both statutory and non-statutory abuses. If negotiation should fail, they provide legally trained staff to represent their members."
Why do we need unions to do this? are employees all completely unable to do anything for themselves where you work?
"and the vague comment about pension provision (we've always had pension provision!)"
What's vague about it? It's a solid statutory requirement that has already been enforced for large firms, and will be enforced for smaller firms shortly (I can't remember the exact date, but it is set in stone already).
"You're just listing random protections you can remember vaguely that UK workers have, and adding words like "excellent", "incredibly strong" and "effective"."
Well no, I'm listing the quality of them, because that IS the quality of them. As a union volunteer I saw them in action plenty enough and they were of the quality I suggest, but keep making assumptions if it makes you fe
What is the "troll hoax operation"?
You're using a lot of loaded language as the GP pointed out, but at the same time not making much sense.
The problem is that in John Young's article he's trying to setup a hosting solution etc. himself.
What this doesn't imply is what you have suggested - that anonymity in general is dead.
Tell me, if I were to use an open wireless access point, or hack an insecure wireless access point at some random joe's house, or a public access point or similar from a nearby car park, for example, at a busy supermarket, at a service station or so on or even down a quiet side street in a rural area - effectively somewhere where I am either masked by numbers, or masked merely by virtue of being in the arse end of nowhere - and I created a random hotmail account or similar and e-mailed a bunch of leaked documents to somewhere like Wikileaks who would then publish them, how on earth do you think my identity would be discovered? who on earth do you think would track me down and how?
There's so may ways you could do this, even walking through somewhere like Heathrow or a busy train station like London Kings Cross looking like any other business commuter if I accessed wifi from within the gents toilets then again, how would they find out who did it?
There are Wifi cards out there that let you specify a custom MAC address so that isn't going to act as a clue for them, the time for Wikileaks to publish/analyse would likely be so long that it'd grossly mask the time frame the authorities would have to look through CCTV, and when they do what are they looking for? a person with a laptop bag in one of the busiest business commuter stations in the world?
It's still easy as it's ever been to leak and never get caught. You just have to be smart about how you're going to do it. This isn't the same thing as the article you posted discusses though.
Yes:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/domscheit-berg-disputes/
"Domscheit-Berg shocked WikiLeaks supporters this week when he told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel that heâ(TM)d deleted more than 3,500 unpublished documents that he and an associate took with them when they left the organization last year. He said he destroyed the documents because Julian Assange could not guarantee safe handling of the files or their sources."
First link when I Googled it, not hard to find.
Which simply further demonstrates your lack of clue about iOS development more so than it says anything about the validity of your argument.
We support the iPhone and iPad in our iOS products, even if we only support one version of each, the fact we have to make interface changes between the two means we're dealing with fragmentation.
You can pretend it doesn't exist all you want, but that doesn't make it true. It absolutely does exist.
If you simply said "Android still has a bigger fragmentation problem than iOS" then you'd be absolutely correct, but to say it doesn't exist on iOS products at all? That simply shows that you've no idea what the hell you are on about.
No, that's a completely nonsensical definition. If it merely describes devices on sale then it's a pointless term.
Fragmentation is the issue of having different devices with different configurations that may have to be supported in a product. It is simply nothing more than that. The level of fragmentation depends on the number of different combinations you will have to deal with - this can in fact be different from developer to developer depending on how far back or how widely the developer chooses to support a platform.
I don't know why people are bringing what products are on sale into it, it's completely irrelevant that the iPad 1 is no longer on sale - if a developer still feels a need to support it to make developer of their product viable then they still have to deal with that product's differences whether it's on sale or not anymore. Redefining the term to simply refer to products on sale makes the term meaningless, because at that point it bears no resemblance to how developers see the problem, because developers need a term that includes all products they may have to support, not just those on sale. If you're going to redefine the term then fine, but it's then not a stick to beat Android with because it's arbitrary and has no value as a term other than for penis waving.
It was always obvious Apple's products were going to become more fragmented with time, because fragmentation is an inevitable consequence of advancement. Android suffered higher levels of fragmentation quicker simply because it had more different devices on the market, but Apple was never ever going to become immune to it. If Apple fanboys are now trying to redefine what fragmentation is because it's becoming an ever more prominent problem on iOS then I really feel for them, it's pretty sad. I guess said fanboys are just a bit upset they now have egg on their face when people defending their original trolling about Android fragmentation pointed out that this was a problem all advancing platforms have to deal with to advance anyway.
Fragmentation has always been about the number of combinations of features you may have to support, not simply the combinations amongst devices on sale, because people are still developing for iOS5 and earlier, people are still developing for the original iPad, and the iPhone 3GS and earlier, whether they're on sale or not. Increased fragmentation causes a real tangible issue for those developers, but it's one that any sane and competent developer should have expected all along, increased fragmentation is, quite simply, the cost of progress and the only reason to not plan for it in development is if you never plan to support any other devices than those you are developing for initially.
Just keep in mind it can be as high as 1200, it was only this low precisely because of the circumstances of the case (i.e. that he didn't actually do the downloading, nor did he know how, and he also paid for a 3rd party to document removal of the illegal downloads from his system).
The 120 euros in this case doesn't make it sane, the fact given the circumstances of the case, that this guy got any kind of punishment is insane.
"Isn't it interesting how desperate, fallen empires like the UK and the US are to demonstrate that unions don't work?"
Sorry, but in the UK, Unions absolutely do not work well.
I was a member of Unison (one of the UK's biggest unions, ~2million members) for about 6 years. Since then I've been working private sector (unionless) for about 5 years. I went on strike with them over public sector pay and conditions a number of times and even helped with some organising. As such, I know just a bit about unions in the UK and can hardly be called unobjective on the issue as I have a fairly even spread of experience both inside and outside of union circles.
It has nothing to do with empires (if you hadn't forgotten Germany attempted to build itself an empire last century too, and it too fell such that Germany is in itself a fallen empire) and the fact you bring that completely irrelevant and nonsensical point up demonstrates what an utterly stupid point you're starting from. It has to do with the fact that the UK has excellent employee protection laws such that unions are now entirely unnecessary for any reason other than to ensure those laws do not get weakened but as a result they have had to find themselves a new place in the world, sadly, that new place, is political interference and self-interest of the top tier.
What purpose exactly does a union serve in the UK now? we have strong health and safety laws, we have a very decent minimum wage, we have excellent redundancy terms and protection, we have excellent protection against unfair dismissal, we have incredibly strong equality laws, we have an effective industrial tribunal system, we're soon to have enforced pension provision, and so on.
Fundamentally the issues with Unison in the UK (and other unions) is that because the core principles they would originally exist to defend are now written in statute, they do a number of things:
1) Continue to push for wage inflation of their members as the primary method of keeping members on board. Note that a number of bipartisan, and independent studies have found that as of 2011 public sector workers were getting between 10% and 16% more pay for equivalent jobs relative to their private sector counterparts whilst receiving more leave, a better pension and more benefits. One could argue that this is precisely because the public sector doesn't have unions, but if the last few years have shown us anything it's actually because it's unaffordable. In fact, if you look at the rise in council tax in the UK it correlates strongly with the increase in public sector pay and benefits such that the net result is that private sector workers have become less well off because of union actions to over-inflate public sector benefits. It's been clear for some years now that the UK's public sector bill is unaffordable, and as such it is not sensible to argue that public sector wages being higher than private sector by such a degree are fair or sustainable. Unions like to deflect by pointing at the banks but this argument makes no sense - Gordon Brown built the public sector benefits off the back of the bank boom, the whole reason public sector workers were getting such a good deal in the first place was through turning a blind eye to, and milking their success.
2) Political interference, the union elite use their position to push their own political agendas. This is often counter to the interests of their workers, for example, helping Ed Milliband win the Labour leadership contest despite his brother, David, being a much more capable, much more competent, and much more viable counter to David Cameron. Effectively the unions ensured continuation of Brown era leadership putting people like Ed Balls (someone who I have met and spoken to personally a number of times) into key opposition positions despite him being a key architect of Brown's failed financial policies. It is a circle of vested self-interest that benefits no one other than themselves.
Honestly, unions in the UK do little more than pick fights
I used to wonder this but nowadays I know.
It's for the hipsters with their skin-tight jeans, where anything thicker than a piece of paper is a battle to get in/out of their pockets.
No it doesn't.
The obvious example is that if you take 10% more money and end up having to spend 20% more time at work then you've made a net loss. Similarly, if you take 10% more money for a job where you'll be working with technologies that are obsolete then you've stunted future career growth, if you take 10% when your employer 3 months down the line was going to promote you and increase wage by 20%, then you're going to be worse off overall. There are things like bonuses too, 10% and a 5% bonus is going to be worse than staying where you are if you get a 20% bonus each year for example.
But of course, some people value job satisfaction, some people prefer a bigger pension pot, some people prefer more leave, some people prefer shares and stock options, some people prefer potential future career growth, some people prefer learning potential. Honestly, 10% is peanuts, a company is wasting my time if they offer anything less than 20% to try and pull me over and thus far I've never moved for anything less than 30%.
If you think a mediocre increase in wage is worth jumping ship for no matter what you must either be used to working shit jobs, be really desperate for money, or have simply not worked much in your life.
Read my points again, the Inquisition is merely a combination of points 1, and 2, repeating them here:
1) It's really quite simple, religious extremists have killed people stating they did so because the people they killed refuse to have the same beliefs as them.
2) Dictatorships have killed people because those people wanted to live their lives differently to how the state determined they should live their lives and because they refused to devote their lives to the will of the state and it's leadership.
What the inquisition wasn't, is 3. What states based on Marxist ideals are, is 2, but not 3:
3) What hasn't happened is atheists killing people because those people they would've killed refused to not believe in god.
What implementers of Marxist/Leninist regimes were against was not a belief in god, but merely the idea that you not do as they wish because you'd been told to do/believe something else by your religious leader of choice. If you went up to Lenin and said "I believe in god, but I'll get on and do what you want" he likely wouldn't have cared. If you walked upto him and said "I believe in god, and my religious leader of choice said your idea is stupid" then he'd probably have shot you on the spot. It was about eliminating other sources of power and control from the equation because such sources of power inherently led to a hierarchy which went against their political ideology and which was hence a threat to their ideology. It was not the inherent belief/disbelief that was in question, but the fact that you would bend to the will of someone else.
The Inquisition was about the political elite using inquisitors as their security aparatus in the name of religion.
This was the key point for me, a 10% rise just isn't that much really.
If you're happy where you are, then stick with it.
That's great, I too have seen many cracked screens on the train every day, a friend of mine has actually been through 4 screens on one phone.
But regardless, anecdotes are meaningless and we could go back and forth all day, so instead let's focus on the facts - the iPhone doesn't use gorilla glass or equivalent, it uses a much cheaper, weaker material than just about all flagship Android devices (the Galaxy Nexus is one exception I can think of). As such, the iPhone objectively has a weaker screen and is hence more likely and more prone to breaking whatever your anecdotes might say. As for the Blackberry I can't comment, but certainly there is objectively some truth in what the GP is saying - the iPhone has a much weaker screen than one would normally expect for the price, particularly when comparing to it's main competition, so it would make sense that on average it ends up with a broken screen more so than at least most equivalent Android (and for that matter, Windows Phone) handsets.